Maelstrom

Chapter 47: Getting to Know All About You

The sweats were warm, if way too big. I zipped the hoodie midway up my sternum and rolled the heather gray sleeves to my wrists, but let the long legs of the pants drape over my bare feet. The chill of my wet hair on my scalp sent a shiver over my freshly washed skin.

Or maybe the shiver was from thinking about showering with Ivan. We both had finally been too spent to do anything vigorously sexual in there, but the combination of sluicing hot water and curious, gentle fingers had been beyond decadent.

I watched as he pulled a faded University of Miami T-shirt over his head and raked his damp hair back with a long-fingered hand.

"Is that where you went to school?" I asked. I was nearly 100 percent certain that it wasn't, but neither I nor anyone else in U.S. law enforcement knew anything about what Ivan Alkaev did before infiltrating the Miami underworld a few years ago, so I figured I might as well throw the question out there.

He glanced down at the large orange and green U on his chest. "No, just lived in the same town." He strolled over to me with a confident ease and planted a kiss on my temple as he slung an arm about my shoulders and led me out of the bedroom to the living room sofa. I wriggled deep into the loosely stuffed cushions and watched him dreamily as he strode into the kitchen area.

"Coffee?" he asked, already pulling a small espresso maker and a stainless steel bean grinder forward on the counter.

"No, thanks," I said. "I never really got into drinking coffee. I love the smell, though."

Ivan put one of the small espresso cups he'd taken out back into the cupboard. "Tea?" he asked.

"If it's not too much trouble."

"So polite," he teased. He considered the cabinet's interior. "Hmm. I don't have much of a selection – green, okay?"

"Green tea is perfect."

He pulled out a larger mug and a box of tea bags and began filling a kettle. "No meat, no dairy, and no coffee. Any other big 'no's' I should know about?"

I wrinkled my nose. With Ivan just rattling off a list like that, I was sounding a bit high-maintenance. Maybe quite high-maintenance. Or self-righteously ascetic, perhaps. Still, I decided I'd better give him an honest answer, no matter how uptight it made me seem. Honesty from me was necessarily in short supply here, so I decided to give it whenever I safely could.

"No smoking," I began.

"I figured." With the kettle now heating on the stove and the espresso maker doing something noisily on the counter, Ivan padded over to the sofa. I tucked my legs under my bottom so he could sit close if he chose to do so. He did. "You don't taste like a smoker," he explained, and kissed me long and deeply and leisurely.

I could get used to this, I thought, sucking lightly on his lower lip. He laughed softly and slipped his fingers into my cool, damp hair. What was it that Rhett Butler had said to Scarlett O'Hara about kissing? "You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how." I sighed as I relaxed my whole body into him. Often, yes. I was pretty sure I could be happy spending most of my waking hours kissing Ivan. I'd be stinky, starving, and unemployed, but happy.

He began moving his mouth along my jaw and down my arching neck. "Anything else?" he prompted.

"No sun without sunscreen," I murmured. As he continued to trail his tongue and lips down my neck, my thoughts veered inevitably in a more sexual direction. "No whips or chains or any ultra-kinky stuff," I added, then frowned. "I admit I don't get the whole 'pain is pleasure' thing; I'm pretty sure that pain is my body's way of telling me not to do something, and I generally try to listen."

I felt Ivan laugh against the hollow of my throat, but his face was all seriousness when he looked at me. His hand tightened on the back of my neck. His eyes were hot, intense, almost searing as they bored into mine.

"And what if I told you that I am into that?"